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Reason Wafawarova
After a conspicuous silence following the larruping of his party by Zanu-PF, Nelson Chamisa finally gathered enough courage to make a response to the trouncing for which he must personally shoulder most of the blame, given that he is the party’s organising chief.It appears that Nelson Chamisa did more agonising than organising when his party went on a candidate imposition spree at the candidate selection stage that led up to this gigantic defeat. More startling is the fact that most of the imposition was done to suit the personal preferences of party leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

Chamisa struttingly wrote in a piece published by a number of online publications, “Strategy is about outflanking your opposite number and never doing what your competitor expects you to do. Dexterity is the ability to move out of the orbit or zones of doubt to zones of confidence.”

One would think the writer of these sentiments was the spokesperson for Zanu-PF, the party that evidently spend the last four and half years outflanking Morgan Tsvangirai and is MDC-T with breathtaking wizardry and exquisite dexterity. The MDC-T was expectedly trapped into the temptation of corruption, and the party’s urban councils wantonly looted anything in their wake, with one Harare councillor hastily building a 24-bedroomed mansion to showcase his newly acquired power status.

As soon as Zanu-PF saw this satiating by the political novices the MDC-T self-destruction was encouraged in a number of strategic ways, and at one time a stinkingly corrupt Chitungwiza team of councillors counted among its allies Zanu-PF’s Ignatius Chombo.

Morgan Tsvangirai felt really pampered with a maroon Mercedes and a mansion to his entitlement, and Zanu-PF allowed its junior attack dogs to spar with the new Prime Minister in inconsequential power fights centred on the offices of Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono and Attorney General Johannes Tomana.

Tsvangirai blissfully obliged to the junior wars before he fizzled out to concentrate more the sexual pleasures of this world — an aberration that came with a huge withdrawal from his political clout account.

At the height of this distraction one Brigadier Douglas Nyikayaramba kept Tsvangirai and his lieutenants pretty busy after declaring, “Tsvangirai doesn’t pose a political threat in any way in Zimbabwe, but is a major security threat.”

So infuriated was the MDC-T leadership that Nyikayaramba was elevated to a “GPA outstanding issue,” and the duo of Tendai Biti and Elton Mangoma dutifully took his case to the facilitating South Africans, fully convinced that they were dealing Zanu-PF excruciating public blows. Some lady in President Zuma’s office helped a lot in encouraging this route of trivialities, and she became an instant hero in the MDC-T circles.

After Nyikayaramba was done with distracting the political novices Tsvangirai was left whimpering endlessly about his thwarted desire to chair a fully attended Council of Ministers — some ceremonial weekly gathering that Zanu-PF Ministers enjoyed boycotting. It appears a lot was done to keep Morgan Tsvangirai away from the electorate as much as possible — all the time appearing in the media making desperate cries of frustration over power games.

The fact that he did not seem to be winning any of his many petty wars did not help. Zanu-PF knew very well that all MDC-T heavyweights were too busy learning governance ropes in government and also accumulating for themselves whatever material benefits they could lay their hands on, and the revolutionary party took advantage of this latency to reach out to the masses in a silent but very effective way, in typical guerrilla mobilising style and tact.

The political novices in the MDC-T saw nothing of this; and where they did Chamisa pacified everyone saying the MDC-T was a “party of excellence” waiting to take over from a “sunset Zanu-PF party”.

Nelson Chamisa calls it dexterity when he dances and mocks Zanu-PF at those red colour MDC-T rallies and he has no intentions to be joking. All the 60 rallies the MDC-T rallies held in the run up to the election were about Zanu-PF and its perceived hopelessness and never about the MDC-T or its plan for the people, except for the facetious promise of a million jobs from “rich friends.”

But we must pay attention when Chamisa says he has to “confess” that he and his colleagues are not “the first borns and last borns in the field of foresight, strategy, courage and skill . . .,” and he argues that the decision by his party to make a pretend withdrawal of the election petition court application was a strategy “to refuse to give Zanu-PF an open cheque to write and confirm their false legitimacy.”

Firstly Nelson Chamisa must publicly admit that the organising department he leads at party level approached Election 2013 with absolutely nothing in the fields of foresight, strategy, courage and skill. Chamisa was simply armed to the teeth with complacency and impertinence. In terms of strategy JUICE was simply inefficacious, the red colour rallies were fallacious, the perceived courage of Tsvangirai was ostentatious, and Nelson Chamisa’s perceived skills in organising the party proved to be immensely lamentable.

Chamisa claims Zanu-PF is “shocked and angry at our refusal to be kowtowed and shepherded into the political slaughterhouse.” What a hilarious joke!

If Nelson Chamisa still has to realise that his party is already lying half dead in the political slaughterhouse he is more woeful than he publicly appears. Someone must wake Chamisa up and tell him that his party was indeed slaughtered emphatically by Zanu-PF on July 31. The only political party that is “shocked and angry” in Zimbabwe at the moment is the MDC-T and every right thinking Zimbabwean knows that.

It is interesting to read that the MDC-T organising secretary thinks his party has “redrawn the battle lines” when the only battle lines visible are within the strife-stricken MDC-T, and when Roy Bennet has decided to quit the circus — all because the natives in the party are living up to their stereotype, exhibiting frustrating monkey behaviour as if they have forgotten the principal objective of their financiers and masters.

Chamisa must realise that his party’s predicament is no dancing matter and he must stop fantasising about pretentious battle lines — throwing childish aimless blows into thin air. This is no clowning time. It is time to retreat, regroup and strategise.

To prove the importance of trivia within the MDC-T psyche, Chamisa candidly admits that the reasons for going to court after the election defeat had nothing to do with any fraud allegations; and he declares that “the reasons for going to court were political.” He explains that to the MDC-T the legal route was never a genuine pursuit for justice, but “inherently designed as a validating act” to some unspecified political mischief Chamisa promises his beleaguered party will carry out one fateful day.

The man says the court application was nothing more than political grandstanding meant to “extract maximum take home political value.” This is his idea of dexterity and he is about the best the MDC-T has got in its ranks. He also admits that the court application was “premised not so much on the axis of a favourable outcome,” and one wonders why MDC-T seems overly flummoxed that not many Zimbabweans take the party seriously any more.

It is quite wise and correct for Chamisa to publicly admit that “participating in such a hopeless and futile (court) case would have been fatal and would be to allow ourselves to be dragged into the washer.”

Sadly the “party of excellence” badly needs to jump itself into the washer if only to rid itself of the stench and mud stemming out of the routing it received at the hands of a ruthlessly popular Zanu-PF.

In apparent reference to Western funders Chamisa says a court humiliation at the hands of Zanu-PF would “pre-empt the actions and judgement” of MDC-T funders “who would want to help the loving people of Zimbabwe”. The reasoning here is that it is better to keep pretending that the election was rigged than to be proven wrong in a court of law.

That way it can be hoped that the stranded Western funders could keep the money coming in on the vainglorious pretext of a “return to majority rule,” as Chamisa puts it.

Clearly Nelson Chamisa mistakes the MDC-T crisis for a national crisis, even a governance one. Since independence in 1980, the only governance crisis Zimbabwe has ever known was the so-called GPA inclusive government in which Nelson Chamisa secured a portfolio as a cabinet minister.

It is this crisis that has been conclusively resolved by the decisive electoral triumph of Zanu-PF, and if Chamisa sees a crisis ahead it can only be the crisis of his ruined employment status, especially given that the young politician has never really worked anywhere outside politics.

Contrary to earlier claims that the petition withdrawal (which at law was invalid and impractical) was on the basis of denied access to evidence, Nelson Chamisa wrote, “we have tonnes of evidence and acres of dossier.” This probably includes Tendai Biti’s mutating ballot papers and Deborah Bronnert’s mystical 10 000 “assisted voters”.

But who advises Nelson Chamisa? Is it Trust Mamombe his director at the disorganising office?
This writer used to know far more logical characters in Mamombe and Chamisa during those unforgettable days of student politics. This clownish spectacle Chamisa is publicly proving to be is quite mesmerising if the truth were to be told.

On one end Chamisa says his party leaders avoided humiliating themselves in court by withdrawing the court application on the basis of lack of evidence. In the next breath the excitable politician brags confusedly about his party’s possession of “tonnes of evidence.” Clearly Chamisa misses this casuistic contradiction.

In his writing Chamisa dwells a lot on the issue of illegitimacy, repeatedly claiming that the MDC-T endorsement of a Zanu-PF election victory constitutes legitimacy, and that the converse where such endorsement is refused is tantamount to “a crisis of illegitimacy.”

The reasoning is harebrained, neurotic and highly deranged. It is not different from Tsvangirai’s pre-election delusions that made him once declare “I hold the keys to the elections.” Clearly the opinion of the defeated MDC-T does not matter when it comes to who makes up Zimbabwe’s next government.

Zanu-PF enjoys the opinion of the majority and the party treats as a bonus the endorsement by both the AU and by Sadc.
MDC-T is no longer a regional issue as far as Sadc is concerned. The party has been relegated to the domestic opposition politics of Zimbabwe where it rightly belongs.

The next government of Zimbabwe is going to be exclusively made up of Zanu-PF politicians, and it is Zanu-PF that will retain regional importance within Sadc circles. Everyone else must cease themselves with the business of climbing down.

To drive this point home Sadc only invited President Robert Mugabe to the Lilongwe Sadc summit.
Thoko Khupe tried gate crashing and was accordingly shut out, much to the agony of the beleaguered Morgan Tsvangirai.

The man thought the GPA chapter was going to be closed at a Sadc summit as was the beginning of the animal. He did not realise that closure was going to be in the hands of the sanctions-smitten Zimbabwean voters. These are the people who took this year’s election as an opportunity to discipline Tsvangirai for his innumerable sins, chief of which were his persistent ill-thought threats he was wantonly dishing out at political rallies.

Many times Morgan Tsvangirai was waving wads of inflation-era Zim dollars and was always threatening voters saying without him ruling Zimbabwe everyone would suffer the consequences at the hands of his “rich friends” from the West.

His hangers-on are still dishing out these vainglorious threats and people are clearly less than threatened.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!!

 Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.